So what IS this higher life or is it just a big mistake?

OK, I've been listening to that lengthy study of Keswick theology I've put on my list of links. The speaker Andrew Naselli speaks rapidly and is only covering an outline he doesn't want to take up time fleshing out, so I have to start and stop the tape frequently to get parts of it and may be missing some important points.

Although at first he appears to be addressing a fundamentalist audience, at various points he identifies his perspective as Reformed, and it sounds to me like pretty typical Reformed thinking on this subject.

As usual the main criticism of the Higher Life/Holiness/Keswick style teaching is that justification and sanctification are chronologically split into two separate events -- the initial belief in Christ of the forgiveness of sin, and a second later experience of the power of the Spirit that makes it possible to live without known sin -- while the Reformed perspective insists that both are complete in the believer at the moment of belief, and both are worked out progressively over time as well. So you are both fully justified and fully sanctified and baptized in the Spirit upon belief although you have no conscious apprehension of the baptism. Another target of the Reformed critique is the idea of "sinless perfection" which some Holiness groups attribute to the "second blessing" or "Spirit baptism" or experience of sanctification which is the second stage or event in the Christian life. Yet another target is the effect of the system in creating two separate classes of Christians, the "carnal" Christian and the spiritual Christian, while according to the Reformed view Christians are by definition spiritual although they may succumb to carnal attitudes to different degrees, and a person who really is carnal can't be a Christian, as that is the defintion of an unbeliever.

Now I've heard this kind of criticism many times, and I don't doubt its correctness as presented. I know that J.C. Ryle also had this criticism of the Holiness movement and since I admire his teaching very much I have to take it seriously.

At the same time something important is getting lost. Those Holiness people, the best of them at least, truly had an experience of the power of God that transformed them, usually years after their initial conversion. It changed them overnight from struggling Christians -- who despite active service for Christ kept falling into various "besetting sins" and weaknesses of personality -- into joyful lovers of God and powerhouses of bold witness such as the apostles became after Pentecost. The comparison with Pentecost can't be denied.

I have Jessie Penn-Lewis' experience in mind here as I was most recently reading her biography, so let me stick to her for now. She was certainly a staunch Keswickian. The effect of her personal transformation was personally dramatic, but the effect on her Bible teaching, which she had been doing for years with classes of young girls, was to bring about conversions of the sort we normally only hear about in revival accounts. In fact the equation is quite clear. Life begets life and whatever you want to call what happened to her personally, it was a fullness of the life of the Holy Spirit that she did not have previously and it begat that same fullness of life in many of those she was teaching.

So, everything the Reformed say may be true, may in fact be the better basic understanding of what happens at initial belief, but SOMETHING has to explain the fact that these dramatic changes have really happened to many people, and even if their own explanations are faulty, if they have the theology wrong on various points, at least they preserve the reality of a transformative experience of God that it is hard to deny is of utmost value to Christian life and work. So perhaps some of this is a semantic problem, such that we are both fully justified and fully sanctified upon initial conversion, and we are progressively being justified and sanctified as we continue in our Christian life, and yet SOMETHING happens to SOME Christians that sounds like it OUGHT to be the standard of the normal Christian life. Only a few ever seek it or find it, and the kind of teaching you get from such as this Reformed teacher would certainly dampen any yearnings in that direction. But whether we know what to call it or not it's of God and it's higher than the usual Christian existence and it is devoutly to be desired.

That's where I'm at about this at the moment.